10 Tips for Surviving Your Office Holiday Party

You're a professional. You're not gonna flirt with Mike in sales and spill a vodka soda on Weird Donna's ugly clogs and go to the bathroom to pee-bond with a really beautiful co-worker who always intimidated you. (But, uh, you might.) (She's just so beautiful!)

1. Eat as much bread/carb stuffs and drink as much water as possible beforehand. You might reply, "But Anna, they will have free food there! Why buy dinner?" Because pitting open bar access against the one or two spring rolls you will snatch off some poor bored caterer's tray at the beginning of the night is a horrible idea. And no, you are not going to drink a glass of water for every drink you have, because that is the kind of thing we always say we're going to do, but life is what happens when we're busy making other plans, as Courtney Stodden John Lennon once famously said.

2. Roll up late. This is a good rule of thumb for all parties, not only because it indicates that you have way cooler places to be. More importantly, you don't want to end up one of the first two people there, standing against a wall rapidly pounding G&Ts and shouting bland niceties over "What Does The Fox Say" to the 5-foot-4 bucktoothed guy from marketing who is staring down your dress. If you show up on time, or even a touch late, you will be hammered by the time everyone else arrives.

3. Bring no one, or someone who knows at least one or two of your coworkers — however many it takes for them to be able to wobble around the party alone on their own two coltish legs. Every year, one or two people will bring their silent, unhappy partners. That's basically just social waterboarding. "This is [Generic Significant Other!]" she/he will exclaim, thrusting him/her upon you even though neither of you truly feel the need to make small talk, or even acknowledge each other in any way. Eventually, as the employees get drunker and more talkative, they will grow more callous and shut out the S.O., and he/she will end up drifting after whoever brought them, quietly getting shitfaced, or talking to the bartender, getting quietly shitfaced. Leave your boyfriend at home.

4. But do hang out with your boss's wife, in the event that your boss is a man and has a wife. She will likely be hanging around like your average S.O. and attempting to drown her discomfort by tossing her amazing blowout and mainlining pinot like a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, but she has clout. Schmoozing her could someday mean the difference between redundancy and a raise. Plus, she is likely more interesting than 70 percent of your coworkers. Unfortunately, the same rules don't apply to your female boss's husband — if you're a young woman who spends the whole night chatting with your boss's husband, I don't think I need to tell you why that might bite you in the ass.

4. Don't smoke weed beforehand. I know this is a lame rule that makes everything less fun, but think of all the conversations you've had with high people in forced situations, when you yourself were not also high. Horrible, right? Don't inflict your banal stoned conversations on anyone who is not also smoking and sharing a box of Frosted Flakes with you while you watch cat clips on YouTube.

5. Wear whatever the fuck you want. Whether that's dressing like a raindeer-sweater-clad Annie Hall or wearing a short, tight LBD. Do you think men are staring at their closets, anxious that wearing those pants will make them look (1) Not skanky enough or (2) Like big skanky skanks? They're not. Obviously you're not going to wear a see-through mesh '90s raver outfit to a party your boss will be at, but outside of the clearly-inappropriate fluffer-in-an-adult-film outfits you see in the window of Sixth Avenue sex shops, there's absolutely no reason not to wear what you what because you think it's "inappropriate." We usually err on the side of caution about these things, and if you're on the fence, you're probably making a mountain out of a molehill/a tiny bit of cleavage.

6. Don't be the person who keeps bringing the subject back to work. Please, for the love of God, do not start venting to someone on the bathroom line about how Donna just doesn't file her invoices on time, and it makes you look bad, and blah blah blah. Everyone is drunk, and this is when you can find out the amazingly freaky details of your co-workers personal lives instead of whining about the 9 to 5. Don't you want to know if the quiet 43-year-old family man at the next desk once slept with Sharon Stone in Fort Lauderdale? I sure as shit do.

7. Do not turn into That Girl. Okay, so there is a different iteration of That Girl for everybody, but for me, it means undermining other female coworkers to get male attention. We've all had a certain kind of coworker who morphs into That Girl when she's had too much to drink. And I'm not talking about the hot mess who gets drunk enough to have sex with her coworker in the broom closet — that's ill-advised, but it's not mean spirited. This version of That Girl subtly disses the other women in the conversation and tries to prove that she's the "exception" to all other women. And she might fool the guys, but the women will notice, and that is the kind of thing that sticks. If you know you have a tendency to become That Girl, keep it to a two-drink minimum so you don't regret it later.

8. Avoid hooking up with anyone. Office attractions, much like Channing Tatum's delts, are strong and undeniable. And for every few failed coworker romances, one successful one has lasted forever — but just don't consummate it at the boozy holiday party. If you connect with someone, or reach a new level with your crush, that's awesome. Just wait until you're sober to see how you feel. If you have sex, everyone's gonna know, and it's just gonna be weird on Monday.

9. Don't be the tiny, bitchy clique in the corner who doesn't talk to anyone else all night. You all think you're Regina, but you're actually Gretchen. And Donna knows you are talking about her ugly clogs. Mingle with everyone, at least a little bit, and save the snark for the ride home.